Town Musician

Friday, February 22, 2008

Waves of trivialities

I have noticed that the media are flooding us with trivialities. On the cheap we get suffocated by endless stories about this murderer or that vane actress or one more hyped up election campaign soundbite. What's going on? Have we lost our perspective? We are lunching on the familiar of whom we love to hate, all fanned by the words of our newscasters. Are all the stories we get through the media worth more than what we experience in our private lives? I see that the real stories are right here at home. They evolve and they hang there with little consequence for now. Neighbors are fading because we are too busy. It is more important that a presidential candidate's former aides are leaving to support the current favorite, like rats leaving the sinking ship. Maybe that's understandable, in face of the need to secure a job in a future administration. Is that what we want to be, though? Do we want to be mercenaries looking only for who pays us best for our loyalties? Television has become our surrogate friend, and companion and distraction. We look at our sports teams as our vicarious tribes, our lost families, our nation's hope. But real life goes on underneath, unnoticed and unloved. There are real people out there full of fear that reality has left no one to care for them, and they are going to react sooner or later. I hope it is not too late for us to turn the tide.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

We learn to wonder

Happiness is conversion. Let's not forget the happy tune or the book written with joy. I venture to say that reading a book, singing a song, or hearing the waves of the ancient sea, leads the body's chemistry away from the nagging doubts life inserts like a nasty wind. The sailor goes out to sea in the face of a brewing storm with a sea chanty on his mind. I listen to "Partons, la mer est belle," and I know out there is a world full of promise in spite of tragedy. Let's make more happy music; let's read more joy into our lives. Let's take the harmonica, the fiddle, or the recorder along, or remember the song whenever sadness takes a hold and sing it out loud if necessary. With music or a good book, a friend -- chosen with care to keep the spirits in check -- is always by our side and keeps us company. Let's not make bad music, though. Know the difference!

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Repeat a lie a thousand times ...

The phrase "repeat a lie a thousand times, and it becomes the truth" is attributed to Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister during Hitler's Germany. This phrase seems to have taken wings in the current scandal about whether mercury from Thimerosal or dental amalgam or other sources can do damage to children and adults. The media are being inundated with pro-Thimerosal articles.

It is not by accident that governmental health organization such as the CDC are always taking the side of the most powerful and wealthiest lobbies. They include the AMA, the ADA, and others. There are conflicts of interest. Studies that have been done concerning the damaging effects of mercury, namely autism, are often unscientific. But what is worse is the changing of a study to fit the lobbies' needs of making mercury as non-toxic as possible. An example is the Verstraeten study of vaccines and Thimerosal.

At the start, the original study seems to support the theory that mercury causes autism. Then the parameters are deliberately changed so that when the final published study comes out, it reflects the pro-mercury side and avoids the truth about how damaging mercury can be.

A more recent study (Pediatrics 2008) purports that autism cannot come from vaccines because infants excrete mercury very fast. The excretion rate may be very fast, but who says that nothing was damaged during the time (two or three days) that the mercury circulated in the body. It is outrageous for a scientist like Dr. Pichichero to say that mercury doesn't do anything to a baby when it is know that the first thing it will do is damage the kidneys. The tissues of the children tested was not studied. The kidney does not cry out in pain when it can't excrete mercury. Apparently the place where the mercury was excreted was through the gutt.

If anyone says that poisoning could not have happened in as short a time as reported, then shouldn't all those people who are drunk behind the wheel only minutes after they have imbibed a bottle of vodka be free of toxins? In fact, they are intoxicated. The babies who get mercury from whatever source are also intoxicated. The fact is that Canadian researcher Graham George presented a lecture at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) saying that ethyl mercury can pass the blood-brain barrier in less than an hour. Once it is in the brain, its half-life for excretion is about twenty years.

Lying seems to have become a pervasive propaganda ploy in government as well as the media. We need the truth. Otherwise we'll become like that person mentioned above.